What if you bought Qualcomm in 1995?
US Tech · Chips. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play64.0× · S&P 500 same money: $14,783
$1,000 in Qualcomm at the start of 1995 would be worth about $64,000 today — 64.0 times your money, and ahead of the S&P 500 over the same stretch.
The story
Qualcomm bet early on CDMA, a wireless technology many in the industry doubted, and won. Holding key patents meant it collected royalties on a large share of the world's mobile phones, whether or not they used Qualcomm chips. In 1999, as investors grasped what that meant, the stock rose more than twentyfold in a single year, one of the most extraordinary moves ever recorded by a large company, and then lost about four fifths of its value in the crash.
The business that followed was lucrative and litigious. Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips powered most premium Android phones, while its licensing model drew antitrust fines in China, South Korea and the EU and a long legal war with Apple, settled in 2019. In 2018 the US government blocked a hostile takeover bid from Broadcom on national security grounds. Apple's plan to replace Qualcomm modems with its own and slow smartphone growth kept the shares range-bound for long stretches. A buyer at the start of 2000 waited the better part of two decades to break even.
The lesson: Patents can be a powerful moat, but a moat that depends on royalties invites regulators and customers to spend years trying to drain it.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | $2.50 | $64,000 | $14,783 | 64.0× |
| 2000 | $88.00 | $1,818 | $4,626 | 1.8× |
| 2003 | $18.00 | $8,889 | $7,727 | 8.9× |
| 2005 | $42.00 | $3,810 | $5,763 | 3.8× |
| 2007 | $38.00 | $4,211 | $4,789 | 4.2× |
| 2008 | $40.00 | $4,000 | $4,626 | 4.0× |
| 2010 | $46.00 | $3,478 | $6,071 | 3.5× |
| 2012 | $55.00 | $2,909 | $5,312 | 2.9× |
| 2015 | $74.00 | $2,162 | $3,301 | 2.2× |
| 2018 | $64.00 | $2,500 | $2,519 | 2.5× |
| 2020 | $88.00 | $1,818 | $2,092 | 1.8× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 1995, turning $1,000 into $64,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $14,783.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Qualcomm is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in US Tech
- What if you bought Apple?
- What if you bought Microsoft?
- What if you bought Amazon?
- What if you bought Nvidia?
- What if you bought Google / Alphabet?
- What if you bought Facebook / Meta?